He retired early, unwontedly weary.
Sleep, however, would not come. For one thing, the summer night was warm; hardly a breath of air stirred. For another, even above the ululation of the frogs and the demoniac insistence of the whippoorwills, sounds from within the house invaded his consciousness—the creaks and groans of a many-timbered house settling in for the night; a peculiar scuffling or shuffling sound, half-drag, half-hop, which Abner laid to rats, which must abound in the mill section of the structure—and indeed, the noises were muffled, and seemed to reach him as from some distance; and, at one time, the cracking of wood and the tinkle of glass, which, Abner guessed, very probably came from the window above the mill wheel. The house was virtually falling to pieces about him; it was as if he served as a catalytic agent to bring about the final dissolution of the old structure.
This concept amused him because it struck him that, willy-nilly, he was carrying out his grandfather’s adjuration. And, so bemused, he fell asleep.
He was awakened early in the morning by the ringing of the telephone, which he had had the foresight to have connected for the duration of his visit in Dunwich. He had already taken down the receiver from the ancient instrument attached to the wall before he realized that the call was on a party line and not intended for him. Nevertheless, the woman’s voice that leapt out at him, burst open his ear with such screaming insistence that he remained frozen to the telephone.
“I tell ye, Mis’ Corey, I heard things las’ night—the graoun’ was a-talkin’ agen, and along abaout midnight I heerd that scream—I never figgered a caow’s scream that way—jest like a rabbit, only deeper. That was Lutey Sawyer’s caow—they faoun’ her this morning—more’n haff et by animals . . .”
“Mis’ Bishop, you dun’t s’pose . . . it’s come back?”
“I dun’t know. I hope t’Gawd it ain’t. But it’s the same as the las’ time.”
“Was it jest that one caow took?”
“Jest the one. I ain’t heerd abaout no more. But that’s how it begun the las’ time, Mis’ Corey.”
Quietly, Abner replaced the receiver. He smiled grimly at this evidence of the rampant superstitions of the Dunwich natives. He had never really known the depths of ignorance and superstition in which dwellers in such out-of-the-way places as Dunwich lived, and this manifestation of it was, he was convinced, but a mild sample.
He had little time, however, to dwell upon the subject, for he had to go into town for fresh milk, and he strode forth into the morning of sun and clouds with a certain feeling of relief at such brief escape from the house.
Tobias Whateley was uncommonly sullen and silent at Abner’s entrance.
Abner sensed not only resentment, but a certain tangible fear. He was astonished. To all Abner’s comments Tobias replied in muttered monosyllables.
Thinking to make conversation, he began to tell Tobias what he had overheard on the party line.
“I know it,” said Tobias, curtly, for the first time gazing at Abner’s face with naked terror.
Abner was stunned into silence. Terror vyed with animosity in Tobias’s eyes. His feelings were plain to Abner before he dropped his gaze and took the money Abner offered in payment.
“Yew seen Zebulon?” he asked in a low voice.
“He was at the house,” said Abner.
“Yew talk to him?”
“We talked.”
It seemed as if Tobias expected that certain matters had passed between them, but there was that in his attitude that suggested he was puzzled by subsequent events, which seemed to indicate that Zebulon had not told him what Tobias had expected the old man to tell him, or else that Abner had disregarded some of his uncle’s advice. Abner began to feel completely mystified; added to the superstitious talk of the natives on the telephone, to the strange hints Uncle Zebulon had dropped, this attitude of his cousin Tobias filled him with utter perplexity. Tobias, no more than Zebulon, seemed disinclined to come out frankly and put into words what lay behind his sullen features—each acted as if Abner, as a matter of course, should know.
In his bafflement, he left the store, and walked back to the Whateley house determined to hasten his tasks as much as he could so that he might get away from this forgotten hamlet with its queer, superstition-ridden people, for all that many of them were his relatives.
To that end, he returned to the task of sorting his grandfather’s things as soon as he had had his breakfast, of which he ate very little, for his disagreeable visit to the store had dulled the appetite which he had felt when he had set out for the store earlier.
It was not until late afternoon that he found the record he sought—an old ledger, in which Luther Whateley had made certain entries in his crabbed hand.
IV
By the light of the lamp, Abner sat down to the kitchen table after he had a small repast, and opened Luther Whateley’s ledger. The opening pages had been torn out, but, from an examination of the fragments of sheets still attached to the threads of the sewing, Abner concluded that these pages were purely of accounts, as if his grandfather had taken up an old, not completely used account book for a purpose other than keeping accounts, and had removed such sheets as had been more prosaically utilized.
From the beginning, the entries were cryptic. They were undated, except for the day of the week.
“This Saturday Ariah answered my inquiry. S. was seen sev times with Ralsa Marsh, Obed’s great-grandson. Swam together by night.”
Such was the first entry, clearly pertaining to Aunt Sarey’s visit to Innsmouth, about which Grandfather had plainly inquired of Ariah. Something had impelled Luther to make such inquiry. From what he knew of his grandfather’s character, Abner concluded that the inquiry had been made after Sarey had returned to Dunwich.
Why?
The next entry was pasted in, and was clearly part of a typewritten letter received by Luther Whateley.
“Ralsa Marsh is probably the most repellent of all the family. He is almost degenerate in his looks. I know you have said that it was Libby of your daughters who was the fairest; even so, we cannot imagine how Sarah came to take up with someone who is so repulsive as Ralsa, in whom all those recessive characteristics which have been seen in the Marsh family after Obed’s strange marriage to that Polynesian woman—(the Marshes have denied that Obed’s wife was Polynesian, but of course, he was trading there at that time, and I don’t credit those stories about that uncharted island where he was supposed to have dallied)—seem to have come to fullest fruit.
“As far as I can now ascertain—after all, it is over two months—close to four, I think—since her return to Dunwich—they were constantly together. I am surprised that Ariah did not inform you of this. None of us here had any mandate to halt Sarah’s seeing Ralsa, and, after all, they are cousins and she was visiting at Marshes—not here.”
Abner judged that this letter had been written by a woman, also a cousin, who bore Luther some resentment for Sarah’s not having been sent to stay with her branch of the family. Luther had evidently made inquiry of her regarding Ralsa.
The third entry was once again in Luther’s hand, summarizing a letter from Ariah.
“Saturday. Ariah maintains Deep Ones a sect or quasi-religious group. Sub-human. Said to live in the sea and worship Dagon. Another God named Cthulhu.
Gilled people. Resembling frogs or toads more than fish, but eyes ichthyic.
Claims Obed’s late wife was one. Holds that Obed’s children all bore the marks.
Marshes gilled? How else could they swim a mile and a half to Devil Reef, and back? Marshes eat sparingly, can go without food and drink a long time, diminish or expand in size rapidly.” (To this Luther had appended four scornful exclamation marks.) “Zadok Allen swears he saw Sarah swimming out to Devil Reef. Marshes carrying her along. All naked. Swears he saw Marshes with tough, warty skin.
Some with scales, like fish! Swears he saw them chase and eat fish! Tear them apart like animals.”
The
next entry was again a portion of a letter, patently a reply to one from Grandfather Whateley.
“You ask who is responsible for those ridiculous tales about the Marshes.
Well, Luther, it would be impossible to single out any one or a dozen people over several generations. I agree that old Zadok Allen talks too much, drinks, and may be romancing. But he is only one. The fact is this legendry—or rigmarole, as you call it,—has grown up from one generation to the next.
Through three generations. You have only to look at some of the descendants of Captain Obed to understand why this could have come about. There are some Marsh offspring said to have been too horrible to look upon. Old wives’ tales?
Well, Dr. Rowley Marsh was too ill to attend one of the Marsh women one time; so they had to call Dr. Oilman, and Oilman always said that what he delivered was less than human. And nobody ever saw that particular Marsh, though there were people later who claimed to have seen things moving on two legs that weren’t human. ”
Following this there was but a brief but revealing entry in two words:
“Punished Sarah.”
This must then mark the date of Sarah Whateley’s confinement to the room above the mill. For some time after this entry, there was no mention of his daughter in Luther’s script. Instead, his jottings were not dated in any way, and, judging by the difference in the color of the ink, were made at different times, though run together.
“Many frogs. Seem to bear in on the mill. Seem to be more than in the marshes across the Miskatonic. Sleeping difficult. Are whippoorwills on the increase, too, or is this imagination?. . . Counted thirty-seven frogs at the porch steps tonight.”
There were more entries of this nature. Abner read them all, but there was no clue in them to what the old man had been getting at. Luther Whateley had thereafter kept book on frogs, fog, fish and their movements in the Miskatonic— when they rose and leaped from the water, and so on. This seemed to be unrelated data, and was not in any way connected to the problem of Sarah.
There was another hiatus after this series of notes, and then came a single, underscored entry.
“Ariah was right! ”
But about what had Ariah been right? Abner wondered. And how had Luther Whateley learned that Ariah had been right? There was no evidence that Ariah and Luther had continued their correspondence, or even that Ariah desired to write to the crochety Luther without a letter of direct inquiry from Luther.
There followed a section of the record to which newspaper clippings had been pasted. These were clearly unrelated, but they did establish for Abner the fact that somewhat better than a year had passed before Luther’s next entry, one of the most puzzling Abner found. Indeed, the time hiatus seemed to be closer to two years.
“R. out again.”
If Luther and Sarah were the only people in the house, who was “R.”? Could it have been Ralsa Marsh come to visit? Abner doubted it, for there was nothing to show that Ralsa Marsh harbored any affection for his distant cousin, or certainly he would have pursued her before this.
The next notation seemed to be unrelated.
“Two turtles, one dog, remains of woodchuck. Bishop’s—two cows, found on the Miskatonic end of the pasture.”
A little further along, Luther had set down further such data.
“After one month a total of 17 cattle, 6 sheep. Hideous alterations; size commensurate with amt. of food. Z. over. Anxious about talk going around.”
Could Z. stand for Zebulon? Abner thought it did. Evidently then Zebulon had come in vain, for he had left him, Abner, with only vague and uncertain hints about the situation at the house when Aunt Sarey was confined to the shuttered room. Zebulon, on the evidence of such conversation as he had shared with Abner, knew less than Abner himself did after reading his grandfather’s record. But he did know of Luther’s record; so Luther must have told him he had set down certain facts.
These notations, however, were more in the nature of notes for something to be completed later; they were unaccountably cryptic, unless one had the key of basic knowledge which belonged to Luther Whateley. But a growing sense of urgency was clearly manifest in the old man’s further entries.
“Ada Wilkerson gone. Trace of scuffle. Strong feeling in Dunwich. John Sawyer shook his fist at me—safely across the street, where I couldn’t reach him.”
“Monday. Howard Willie this time. They found one shoe, with the foot still in it!”
The record was now near its end. Many pages, unfortunately, had been detached from it—some with violence—but no clue remained as to why this violence had been done to Grandfather Whateley’s account. It could not have been done by anyone but Luther himself; perhaps, thought Abner, Luther felt he had told too much, and intended to destroy anything which might put a later reader on the track of the true facts regarding Aunt Sarey’s confinement for the rest of her life. He had certainly succeeded.
The next entry once again referred to the elusive “R.”
“R. back at last.”
Then, “Nailed the shutters to the windows of Sarah’s room.”
And at last: “Once he has lost weight, he must be kept on a careful diet and to a controllable size.”
In a way, this was the most enigmatic entry of them all. Was “he” also “R.”?
If so, why must he be kept on a careful diet, and what did Luther Whateley mean by controlling his size? There was no ready answer to these questions in such material as Abner had read thus far, either in this record—or the fragmentary account still left in the record—or in letters previously perused.
He pushed away the record-book, resisting an impulse to burn it. He was exasperated, all the more so because he was uneasily aware of an urgent need to learn the secret embalmed within this old building.
The hour was now late; darkness had fallen some time ago, and the ever-present clamor of the frogs and the whippoorwills had begun once more, rising all around the house. Pushing from his thoughts briefly the apparently unconnected jottings he had been reading, he called from his memory the superstitions of the family, representing those prevalent in the countryside— associating frogs and the calling of whippoorwills and owls with death, and from this meditation progressed readily to the amphibian link which presented itself—the presence of the frogs brought before his mind’s eye a grotesque caricature of one of the Marsh clan of Innsmouth, as described in the letters Luther Whateley had saved for so many years.
Oddly, this very thought, for all that it was so casual, startled him. The insistence of frogs and toads on singing and calling in the vicinity was truly remarkable Yet, batrachia had always been plentiful in the Dunwich vicinity, and he had no way of knowing for how long a period before his arrival they had been calling about the old Whateley house. He discounted the suggestion that his arrival had anything at all to do with it; more than likely, the proximity of the Miskatonic and a low, swampy area immediately across the river on the edge of Dunwich, accounted for the presence of so many frogs.
His exasperation faded away; his concern about the frogs did likewise. He was weary. He got up and put the record left by Luther Whateley carefully into one of his bags, intending to carry it away with him, and to puzzle over it until some sort of meaning came out of it. Somewhere there must exist a clue. If certain horrible events had taken place in the vicinity, something more in the way of a record must exist than Luther Whateley’s spare notes. It would do no good to inquire of Dunwich people; Abner knew they would maintain a close-mouthed silence before an “outsider” like himself, for all that he was related to many of them.
It was then that he thought of the stacks of newspapers, still set aside to be burned. Despite his weariness, he began to go through packs of the Aylesbury Transcript, which carried, from time to time, a Dunwich department.
After an hour’s hasty search, he found three vague articles, none of them in the regular Dunwich columns, which corroborated entries in Luther Whateley’s ledger. The first appeared under the heading:
Wild Animal Slays Stock Near Dunwich— “Several cows and sheep have been slain on farms just outside Dunwich by what appears to be a wild animal of some kind. Traces left at the scenes of the slaughter suggest some large beast, but Professor Bethnail of Miskatonic University’s anthropology department points out that it is not inconceivable that packs of wolves could lurk in the wild hilly country around Dunwich. No beast of the size suggested by the traces reported was ever known to inhabit the eastern seaboard within the memory of man. County officials are investigating.”
Search as he might, Abner could find no follow-up story. He did, however, come upon the story of Ada Wilkerson.
“A widow-lady, Ada Wilkerson, 57, living along the Miskatonic out of Dunwich, may have been the victim of foul play three nights ago. When she failed to visit a friend by appointment in Dunwich, her home was visited. No trace of her was found. However, the door of her house had been broken in, and the furniture had been wildly thrown about, as if a violent struggle had taken place. A very strong musk is said to have pervaded the entire area. Up to press time today, Mrs. Wilkerson has not been heard from.”
Two subsequent paragraphs reported briefly that authorities had not found any clue to Mrs. Wilkerson’s disappearance. The account of a “large animal” was resurrected, lamely, and Professor Bethnall’s beliefs on the possible existence of a wolf-pack, but nothing further, for investigation had disclosed that the missing lady had neither money nor enemies, and no one would have had any motive for killing her.
Finally, there was the account of Howard Willie’s death, headed, Shocking Crime at Dunwich.
“Some time during the night of the twenty-first Howard Willie, 37, a native of Dunwich, was brutally slain as he was on his way home from a fishing trip along the upper reaches of the Miskatonic. Mr. Willie was attacked about half a mile past the Luther Whateley property, as he walked through an arbored lane. He evidently put up a fierce fight, for the ground is badly torn up in all directions. The poor fellow was overcome, and must have been literally torn limb from limb, for the only physical remains of the victim consisted of his right foot, still encased in its shoe. It had evidently been cruelly torn from his leg by great force.
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 17
